Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou: Five Silent Years and What Followed

At eight years old she was raped, testified against the man who did it, and then learned he had been killed. Believing her voice had caused a death, Marguerite Annie Johnson stopped speaking for close to five years. She spent that silence reading, and listening, and memorising, and when she came back she had an instrument no drama school could have built. Everything she did afterwards -- the calypso records, the Ghana years, the inaugural poem, the hotel rooms with the pictures taken down -- was work done with that instrument.

Stamps, Arkansas

She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 4 April 1928. Her parents separated when she was three, and she and her brother were sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to their paternal grandmother. The assault happened during a return to St. Louis. The mutism that followed lasted nearly five years, and the person who ended it was a teacher, Bertha Flowers, who put books into her hands and asked her to read them aloud: Dickens, Shakespeare, Poe, James Weldon Johnson. Angelou credited that period with giving her both her memory and her ear. She was not idle in the silence; she was collecting.

The Working Years

At sixteen she became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco, having simply refused to leave the hiring office. What followed was two decades of professional life that had nothing to do with publishing. She studied dance, taking classes with the choreographer Alvin Ailey. She toured Europe with the opera *Porgy and Bess* in 1954 and 1955. She sang calypso at San Francisco's Purple Onion, where she assembled the stage name Maya Angelou, and recorded her first album, *Miss Calypso*, in 1957.

In 1960 she met Martin Luther King Jr. and helped organise the Cabaret for Freedom, a fundraiser for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Between 1961 and 1965 she worked as an editor in Cairo and then in Ghana, where she became a friend of Malcolm X. Returning to the United States, she was pushed toward writing by the novelist John Oliver Killens and joined the Harlem Writers Guild. She was over forty before her first book appeared.

Caged Bird

*I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings* (1969) covered her life to seventeen and made her internationally famous. Its significance was not only that it was well made but that it broke a taboo: Angelou was among the first African American women to write publicly and in detail about personal sexual trauma. The critic Hilton Als identified the book as one of the first times a Black autobiographer could write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defence.

Six more volumes followed, each covering a defined span: *Gather Together in My Name* (1974) for 1944-48, *Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas* (1976) for 1949-55, *The Heart of a Woman* (1981) for 1957-62, *All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes* (1986) for 1962-65, *A Song Flung Up to Heaven* (2002) for 1965-68, and *Mom & Me & Mom* (2013) on her mother. She did not treat autobiography as transcription. She used dialogue, characterisation and thematic arrangement rather than strict chronology, populated the books with more than a hundred characters, and built the prose on blues structures and oral storytelling. Scholars generally credit her with expanding what the genre could hold.

The Room With No Pictures

Her working method was ritual and it did not change. Each morning she checked into a hotel room and asked the staff to take the pictures off the walls. She wrote lying on the bed on yellow legal pads, ten to twelve pages a day, with sherry, a deck of playing cards, Roget's Thesaurus and the Bible for company. In the evening she cut the day's output down to three or four pages. "I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music," she said.

The Public Voice

*Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie* (1971) earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In 1973 she was nominated for a Tony. Her screenplay *Georgia, Georgia* (1972) was the first original screenplay by a Black woman to be produced, and with *Down in the Delta* (1996) she became the first African American woman to direct a major motion picture.

In 1982 Wake Forest University appointed her the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies, a lifetime post she held without ever having earned a bachelor's degree, teaching philosophy, ethics, theology and writing. From the 1990s she was on the road roughly eighty times a year.

Then, in January 1993, she read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration -- the first poet to do so since Robert Frost in 1961. The recording won a Grammy, one of three she took for spoken-word albums.

Why Maya Is Called a Genius

The strongest specific claim is craft, not intellect in the abstract. Angelou solved a technical problem that had defeated other memoirists: how to make a life narrative move like a novel without falsifying it. She imported fictional machinery -- scene, dialogue, character, thematic sequencing over chronology -- into autobiography and did it consistently across seven volumes, which is why scholars treat the series as a formal innovation rather than a set of memoirs. Add the near-total recall built in five years of silence and the trained performer's ear from her years as a dancer and singer, and the result is a writer who composed for the voice first and the page second. That is a rare and specific skill.

The counter-case is real and comes from serious people. Harold Bloom dismissed her verse as "popular poetry" that "makes no formal or cognitive demands upon the reader," while conceding her sincerity, good will and personal vitality. The linguist John McWhorter read her books as defensive tracts written to rebut racial stereotype rather than as literature pursued for its own ends. Critics broadly rate the prose well above the poetry, and the poem most people can name, "On the Pulse of Morning," is also among the least formally demanding things she wrote.

The fair verdict: Angelou's genius, if the word applies, is architectural and vocal rather than intellectual in the analytic sense. She was not a theorist. She was an unusually good builder of narrative structures, working in a form that had not previously been thought capable of holding them.

Legacy

She received the National Medal of Arts in 2000, the Spingarn Medal in 1994 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, along with more than fifty honorary degrees. She died on 28 May 2014, aged 86, having published four books in her final decade despite failing health. The week after, *Caged Bird* went to number one on Amazon. Her cadences turn up in Tupac Shakur, Kanye West and Common; her books remain fixtures on syllabuses and perennial targets of censorship campaigns over sex, violence and religion. In 2022 she became the first Black woman depicted on the US quarter.

Achievements

• Langston Hughes Medal — 1991
• Spingarn Medal — 1994
• Notable work: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Notable work: On the Pulse of Morning
• Notable work: And Still I Rise
• Notable work: Even the Stars Look Lonesome